The congressional move to undercut the education secretary’s power
Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America.
When Arne Duncan became education secretary in 2009, the nation’s high school dropout problem was on his mind. Hundreds of thousands of young people were leaving school without a diploma every year, all but eliminating their chances of getting a decent job. Many were low-income and minority children who had been packed into “dropout factories” that graduated less than half their students. The national high school graduation rate was about 75 percent and hadn’t improved in decades.
And while there were many causes of that failure, including inadequate funding, poor curricula and challenging family environments, high school graduation rates were stagnant in significant part because many state education departments were systematically lying about the true extent of the problem. Instead of using a common-sense definition of “graduation rate” — the percentage of high school freshmen who earn a diploma on time — states were using statistical legerdemain to concoct graduation rates of 90 percent or above.
Fortunately, Duncan’s predecessor in the George W. Bush administration, Margaret Spellings, had used the authority granted to her by Congress to establish a single national definition of high school graduation rates that didn’t sweep dropouts under the rug. The rule was finalized a few weeks before Barack Obama was elected president and was embraced by Duncan once he took office. No longer able to pretend there was no problem, states and districts tried to improve. Now, after a great deal of hard work by students and educators nationwide, the national graduation rate is above 80 percent — the highest it has ever been.
Yet instead of seeing this as a success story to be replicated, lawmakers in Congress are on the verge of preventing future secretaries of education from taking similar action. And pressure to make a deal and aid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid could push Obama to let them have their way.
Congressional negotiators are currently working to forge a compromise between new House and Senate versions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), last revised in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind Act. While media attention has focused on hot-button issues such as the Common Core State Standards, a potentially sweeping set of changes to the education secretary’s authority has gone largely unnoticed.
During the implementation of No Child Left Behind, some states tried to evade the legally required hard work of identifying and fixing chronically low-performing schools. The Education Department pushed back by threatening The congressional move to undercut the education secretary’s power - The Washington Post:
